As somebody who has temporal lobe seizures, I can see the possibility that maybe Paul was an epileptic. There is also evidence that the prophet Mohammad suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy.
I, and others, have noticed a connection between spiritual experiences and the disease. Other than the complications, I have always told my doctors that temporal lobe epilepsy is an incredible experience. As crazy as it sounds, I almost feel blessed to have my seizures.
A simple engine search reveals all sorts of material. From just one web site, I found the following:
http://www.science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=130 :
Fear and Trembling
Has TLE changed the course of civilization? LaPlante and many other TLE experts speculate that the mystical religious experiences of some of the great prophets were induced by TLE ? because the historical writings describe classic TLE symptoms. The religious prophets most often thought to have had epilepsy are Mohammad, Moses, and St. Paul. Dostoevsky, another famous epileptic whose works are filled with ecstatic visions of universal love (and terrible nightmares of uncanny fear and radical evil), thought it was obvious that Mohammad?s visions of God were triggered by epilepsy. "Mohammad assures us in this Koran that he had seen Paradise," Doestevsky notes. "He did not lie. He had indeed been in Paradise ? during an attack of epilepsy, from which he suffered, as I do."
When Mohammad first had his visions of God, he felt oppressed, smothered, as if his breath were being squeezed from his chest. Later he heard a voice calling his name, but when he turned to find the source of the voice, no one was there. The local Christians, Jews, and Arabs called him insane. When he was five years old, he told his foster parents, "Two men in white raiment came and threw me down and opened up my belly and searched inside for I don?t know what." This description is startling similar to the alien abduction experience described by people with TLE.
Note that the overriding emotion experienced by Mohammed, Moses and St. Paul during their religious visions was not one of rapture and joy but rather of fear. When Moses heard the voice of God from a burning bush, he hid his face and was frightened. Luke and Paul both agreed that Paul suffered from an unknown "illness" or "bodily weakness" which he called his "thorn in the flesh." Many biblical commentators have attributed this to either migraine headaches or epilepsy. Paul did once have malaria, which involves a high fever that can damage the brain. Other psychologists have noted that likely TLE sufferers such as Moses, Flaubert, Saint Paul, and Dostevesky were also famous for their rages.
However, psychologist William James has argued that religious states are not less profound simply because they can be induced by mental anomalies:
"Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensitivity liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often, moreover, these pathological features have helped to give them their religious authority and influence. To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value is quite illogical and arbitrary. [Because if that were the case], none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of the possessor?s body at the time. Saint Paul certainly once had an epileptoid, if not an epileptic, seizure, but there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic processes as its condition."
Robyn